RIDDLING is one step in the traditional method of making Champagne or sparkling
wine, that helps to consolidate sediment to facilitate removing it.

Madame
Nicole-Barbe Clicquot objected to the often cloudy appearance of Champagnes
of the early 1800s. Upon her husband's untimely death, the young widow
became head of Champagne Clicquot. Determined to improve the appearance
of her product, she found that shaking the bottles loosed sediment stuck
to their sides. The sediment would eventually settle to the bottom if
the bottles were left upright. To get the deposits closer to the neck,
she used gravity, cutting holes in her kitchen table to place the bottles
upside down. In 1810, she employed Anton Muller to improve and refine
the process that came to be called riddling.

Instead of
using remodeled kitchen tables, bottles are placed at a forty-five degree
angle, necks-down, in specially built "A-frame" racks, called
pupitres. A
worker grabs the bottom of each bottle, giving it a small shake, an abrupt
back and forth twist, and while slightly increasing the tilt, drops it
back in the rack. This action recurs every one to three days over a period
of several weeks. The shaking and twist is intended dislodge particles
that have clung to the glass and prevent the sediments from caking in
one spot; the tilt and drop encourage the particles, assisted by gravity,
to move ever more downward; the time in between riddlings allows the particles
to settle out of solution again.

Today this
process is nearly entirely done by a machine invented in Spain in the
1970s. Since they handle hundreds of bottles simultaneously, gyropalettes
are both much more efficient and much more consistent at consolidating
sediments than the traditional hand process.

When riddling
is finished, the sediment collected in the bottle neck is frozen to form
a "plug" which the next step in the process removes (dégorgement
or "disgorging"). After adjusting the level of fill and setting
the sweetness, the product is corked, caged, labeled, and shipped to market.